And I'm still on my first life!

If you have a full case of Gameritis like I do, I'm sure this has happened to you before. You play a huge chunk of gameplay that you wouldn't want to suffer through again, and then suddenly you have to go somewhere that requires you to turn off everything. You frantically look around for a save point, but no luck. What do you do?

Well, the situation arose for me during a hefty playtime of Metroid Prime 3 during the weekend. I was hoping to get an hour of good gameplay before I had to leave the house, which I wasn't expecting much to happen. Turns out I killed off a mini-boss, found some upgrades, and explored a large chunk of the area. So obviously, to counter all these good things, karma decided to slap me in the back of my head and not reveal to me any nearby save stations for me to log my progress.
There are only a couple of options available to me in the short amount of time I had left:

1. Play a little more longer to find an existing (but further) save station,
2. Leave the system on while I'm gone for 2 hours, then return to continue playing, or
3. Turn off the system and redo everything all over again.

I had exhausted option 1 a while ago, and option 2 can result in VERY BAD THINGS that I'd hate to go through again...which only left option 3. Painful as it was, I turned off the game. Sorta like ripping off a band-aid really fast.

Personally, I think save points outlived their existence as a useful tool and become more like an extra chore to perform. I'm talking about the solitary, glowing points on the map where the only purpose is to save and that's it. I'm not saying that they should be done away - they should be disguised to something more practical, or make it something that can be done anytime, anywhere. Lots of other games have done this without any complaints, making the gaming experience more streamlined and realistic. I mean, what in real life is a save point?

I guess, in a ironic twist, you can call a blog a person's own "save point." Wow, how weird is that? Oh, hey look, there's even a "save now" button to save a draft of my post.

Okay, time for me to beat this workday "level."